Rock wrote:

Also, did you watch Rockin’ With Seka because the director’s name is Ziggy Ziggowitz Jr?

No, I pretty much watched it because of Seka.

Rock wrote:

Also, Parker has a pretty good emotional shower scene in Sweet Young Foxes, even if it lacks the voyeuristic framing that gives the one in Taboo much of its charge. The movie is a pretty good coming of age piece, with a magnetic lead performance by Hyapatia Lee.

To quote Bernie Mac, "Lord help me, I'll watch."

Kuso

“I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe…”

 Bugs’n’bio. Macabre satirical surreal enigmatic disgusting freejazz dread, The Biohorror–Fried Movie, shitvomitbloodwormsbugsmucousbile, and everybody covered in sores. 
My gross–out threshold is pretty damn high. You have to try really hard. Kuso was up to the task. The title means "shit" in Japanese but I didn’t know it was intentional until I bore witness with my own poor eyes. I rarely avert these eyes from a screen in revulsion, and can count on a lumberjack’s hand the number of times I’ve actually fast–forwarded a little to get past something squirmy. Such feeble attempts at circumvention found no quarter here, though. Thirty seconds later this bitch is still sucking that bug’s guts out, with relish, in extreme closeup. Move the fuck over, Renfield. I remember there being lots of imaginative and entertaining elements to this movie, but such memories are almost entirely eclipsed by the steady viscous flow of “Ewww!” Live–action is intermingled with stop–motion, practical effects, computer–generated psychedelia, more horrid squelchy bits than Mad God, more talking anuses than naked lunch, and enough bugs and worms to give Fulci a run for his money. And so, sooooo much pus mucus shit semen blood guts saliva and bile... or as housekeeping professionals call it, "bio."
Multiple, fantastic and disturbing narratives are interwoven and punctuated by frequent flashes of semi–subliminal clips a la Natural Born Killers, all steadily marinating in grim subconscious commentary. And yes, also George Clinton. Sadly no P-Funk, but the music is pretty good nonetheless.
Kuso is unique, I’ll give it that much, and maybe even one–of–a–kind (I say "maybe" only because I haven’t seen every movie out there). 
Rampop’s rating: six–to–eight sticks of Rolaids, suitcase full of Dramamine, and a pack of eye–condoms. Ugh. Might also want a toilet brush for your brain afterwards.

Bill Burr's writing/directing debut has been getting terrible reviews. many of them framing the film as the kind of "old boomers yelling at clouds" type of critique (one review called it an "assault") of these kids today and their PC/SJW over-coddled culture, and none of these reviews seem cognizant of the clarity right on the above poster that Burr is already self-aware that such framing would be inevitable and made it part of the film's central joke.  Burr is, obviously, quite critical of the slightly hyberbolized (even if he doesn't understand that word) over-coddled culture of today's liberal America, but it isn't as if Burr neglects satirizing the flaws of his or older generations, specifically the unhealthy masculine pent-up anger issues and the FOMO fear of mortality that motivates a lot of today's permissive parenting as desperate gestures of maintaining relevance.  Burr's satire and critical humor is hardly one-sided here, and, indeed, many of the reviews which pre-emptively try to protect the "kids" (anyone under 30, really) from Burr's abuse serve as pretty apt examples of the coddling presumption that these newer generations are especially incapable of coping with getting their feelings hurt.  The film jokes that old school Burr is not a "boomer", but Gen X, but the film also jokes that it's the Gen X parents who are the real problem with the culture, not "the kids" raised by them.

Once the reflexive defensiveness over protecting the children wears off, it should become clear that the particular culture wars that Burr targets are not typical of our more partisan culture wars.  Burr takes on PC language, and sometimes uses outdated or insensitive language (ie, "cocksucker", "cunt", tranny") but there's no specific sentiments against LGBT+, women or ethnic minorities.  Burr calls out education, but never mentions CRT.  It would take some creative interpretation to consider Burr as a Desantis Republican despite his vintage invectives.  And Burr's commentary is more subtle than that.  His true target, among the yuppies spouting new age goop-speak, is their insincerity.  It's the virtue-signaling.  Surprisingly, even a dweeb like Owen Gleiberman (in an otherwise negative review) managed to identify this precisely: "What everyone is really looking for is the socially approved way to get ahead".  Burr's criticism of our fucked-up education system - where public education is abandoned as a failure and affluent, privileged parents joust for elite, gate-keeping private pre-schools as existentially determining their child's future standing in the elitist hierarchy - is not that it's become too progressive, and certainly not because it's more egalitarian or inclusive.  Quite the opposite.  And it's the hypocrisy that these parents will wield woke-speak language, not out of a sincere concern for social justice, but as a form of social jockying and positioning.  Is it possible that so many critics failed to recognize this, or was it this that touched a nerve?  Burr isn't pushing a conservative culture war agenda, he's exposing that much of the gate-keepers of the progressive agenda are actually the same old dog-eat-dog opportunists.

More accurate criticism of the film is that, as Burr's debut, it isn't very compelling filmmaking or storytelling.  He mostly plays it safe from a technical perspective, adhering closely to very standard and predictable emotional cues and plot beats.  The film still feels like a mediocre sitcom much of the time.  Most of the characters are caricatures.  The Dads grow and learn.  They even learn how to listen on their journey to evolution.  Burr has a soft heart at his core, and the film can get corny at times.  But it's also, laugh-for-laugh, one of the funniest modern American comedies that I've seen in several years so that oughta count for something.

7.5/10
 

Also, I've been watching mostly horror this month, but I did have a chance to catch They Live and Dial M for Murder in theatres, the latter in 3-D. Highly recommend seeing both in this environment. Some ramblings about the Hitchcock.

He usually has a certain weight to his presence, which makes his comedic roles funny in ways the filmmakers probably didn't intend.

Rocktober Blood, 1984.
Hilariously stupid. Worthy of the "so–bad–it's–good" designation. While much of it is cookie–cutter variety, eg people making dumb decisions, often amid delightful absurdities of continuity, it also has some legit crazy surprises, and the ending is definitely worth staying for. Directed by Beverly Sebastian (Gator Bait, The Hitchhikers), starring nobody who can act, nobody you'd know (except maybe a 70s-80s power metal band called Sorcery), with a lead role filled by an okay–looking chick willing to be naked in front of the camera a lot. Expect lots of aerobics and highly–reflective mirror–shades. Glad I finished it. 

Early on in this three hour film, Nolan threads a fine needle.  There's sometimes a tendency in films about extraordinary genius which threatens to hagiographically fall into portraying scientific intelligence as an almost supernatural power (ala, Beautiful Mind, etc) and just as this film began down a similar path, it instead veers into finding its sympathetic analogy among artistic intelligence - musicians, poets, painters.  This not only represents Oppenheimer's interior profundity and grace but also acts as a handy rebuke to a modern STEM fool like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who has never missed an opportunity to denigrate philosophy and the liberal arts, as if there was no conceivable harmony between them.  Although the cultural touchstones are fairly obvious (Picasso's cubism, Eliot's Wasteland), this opening section of the film makes an exemplary case for Oppenheimer's own harmonized, omnivorous intellectual appetite.

Unfortunately, for the next couple of hours anyway, the film then largely abandons Oppenheimer's appreciation of spiritual beauty.  The easy answer seems to be with Nolan himself.  As an artist, Nolan mostly relates with the painters, and the film has gorgeous cinematography and numerous cosmic, abstract visual flourishes to convey Oppenheimer's ethereal complexity.  But as for the other mediums, Nolan is no musician, and even if the tepid, tingling puddle of a soundtrack, which is not only ubiquitous but monotonous to boot, wasn't drowning all of the dynamic from one scene to another, Nolan is still not a particularly symphonic filmmaker to complement those rhythms, even if he had the sublime taste of someone like Malick.  Neither is Nolan much of a poet, and his dialogue is trite and tin-eared.  The common cliche is that Nolan is a poor writer of women ("break a leg", indeed), but I think more accurately is that he's a poor writer of intimacy, so even the fraternal relationships here are rarely more than functionally dramatic, regardless of the superb efforts of the performers.  But there's no doubt that Oppenheimer's relationships with women, equally as complex as his other aesthetic and spiritual depths, is given some pretty short shrift here.  The sex scenes have already attracted some ridicule from some corners, and, truth be told, even despite the well-moistened nudity, these scenes are remarkably emotionally chaste and lacking in any eroticism.  And then there's the unfortunate decision to recontextualize Oppenheimer's legendary citation of the Bhagavad Gita, which leads me to wonder two possibilities: that this is simply Nolan's rather edgelord perspective on Oppenheimer's sex life, or; Nolan is incapable of citing any other single verse of either the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads that would be more appropriately erotic and he doesn't really have the curiosity to bother looking for one.  (Both things could also be true.)

So, as emotionally hollow as these first couple of hours of the film, at least Nolan can find the technical tensions of the construction and detonation of the Trinity test to be more in his wheelhouse, and it's here where the film seems to finally come alive.  Even the soundtrack music perks up a little.  This sequence, clearly the centerpiece of the entire film, is unsurprisingly awesome, and, again, Nolan's largely practical FX makes for a montage of splendor.  But more impressively, this sequence also seems to have the effect of rejuvenating the remaining hour of the film for unrelated reasons.  The personal drama gives way to political thriller, a mode with which Nolan seems more comfortable and adequately suited.  He finally finds mythic allusion in themes of power, corruption and arrogance.  He indulges in some of his most abstract, experimental and expressive filmmaking.  And most significantly, he finally finds poetry in the gravity of Oppenheimer's guilt and responsibility, finally finding the film's core emotional resonance.  It's tempting to say it's enough to redeem any of the preceding flaws. 

8/10
 

Jinnistan wrote:

It's a nice touch to have Jesse Plemons, in a role originally intended for DiCaprio, spying Leo through a mirror.

 

I'd like to think Plemons' casting in part was driven by his slight resemblance to Matt Damon, as part of a secret Departed reunion joke on Scorsese's part.

Jinnistan wrote:

And maybe it's from all of the recent promotional interviews I've watched, but De Niro seems to be channelling Scorsese's own irascable condescension.

I'm still chewing the movie over, but another thing I growing to appreciate are the carefully attuned level of condescension that De Niro shows Di Caprio, and the carefully attuned level of condescension that Di Caprio shows the lackeys he pulls into his schemes.

Rock wrote:

I'd like to think Plemons' casting in part was driven by his slight resemblance to Matt Damon, as part of a secret Departed reunion joke on Scorsese's part.

I remember that there was some commentary at the time about how the two Departed characters were a mirror of each other as well.  FTR, I think Plemons is probably the better actor than Damon.

I mostly know Plemmons from Friday Night Lights, which I only saw the first season of, but was surprisingly great.